A nice way to stay in touch with loved ones, and a convenient way to share my opinions without having everyone just walk away...wait a minute, where are you going? I wasn't finished..

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Busy

Hi everybody,

Sorry not to have posted in a while. Been busy. Busy at work with a couple staff on vacation, busy with family (Yay, Noah's in town), busy with investment decisions and trying to find a broker, busy with car problem and repairs, busy trying to find tickets for the Stanford game...Busy, busy, busy, How do I do it? And now we're busy going away to Michigan for a week at the dunes. Love to all

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Another Interesting Englishmen

The last couple paragraphs from the Wilkpedia article on Malcolm Muggeridge

Conversion to Christianity
Having professed publicly to being an agnostic for most of his life, he found his Christian faith, publishing Jesus Rediscovered in 1969 and Jesus: The Man Who Lives in 1976. In A Third Testament, he profiles seven spiritual thinkers, or God's Spies as he called them, who influenced his life: Augustine of Hippo, William Blake, Blaise Pascal, Leo Tolstoy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Søren Kierkegaard, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. In this period he also produced several important BBC documentaries with a religious theme, including In the Footsteps of St. Paul.

[edit]
Subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism
In 1982, he surprised many people by converting to Roman Catholicism at the age of 79 along with his wife, Kitty. This was largely due to the influence of Mother Teresa. His last book was Conversion, published in 1988, and describes his life as a pilgrimage - a spiritual journey.

Muggeridge was a controversial figure - known as a drinker and womaniser in early life. However, his best work came as a result of finding his faith late in life and fighting energetically for moral issues. He is affectionately remembered as St. Mugg. From his book, Jesus: The Man Who Lives, he says, "If the greatest of all, Incarnate God, chooses to be the servant of all, who would wish to be the master?"

A Literary Society in his name was established on March 24th 2003, the occasion of his centenary, and publishes a quarterly newsletter called The Gargoyle

The Israeli Peace Plan

A post to Arianna Huffigton's blog site on Israeli posture in tehe Mid-East:
(I was going to delete number 25 because the source seemed questionable, but the book, the author, and the quote appear accurately attributed.

1. "There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies ­not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy." Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001

2. "The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more".... Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000

3. " [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs." Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts". New Statesman, 25 June 1982.

4. "The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." " Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988

5. "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.

6. "How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." Golda Maier, March 8, 1969.

7. "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed." Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969

8. "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war." Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972.

9. David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?" Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.

10. Ben Gurion also warned in 1948 : "We must do everything to insure they ( the Palestinians) never do return." Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. "The old will die and the young will forget."

11. "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.

12. "Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it." - Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio. (Certainly the FBI's cover-up of the Israeli spy ring/phone tap scandal suggests that Mr. Sharon may not have been joking.)

13. "We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours." Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces - Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.

14. "We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return" David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.

15. "We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai." David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

16. "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum"

17. "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.

18. "We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'" Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

19. Rabin's description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. "We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters" Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas.

20. "There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:...the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish...with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary." Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5.

21. "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them." Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

22. "It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism,colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of 14 July 1972.

23. "Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine,Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.

24. "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." -- Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 [Source: N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1]

25. "We Jews, we are the destroyers and will remain the destroyers. Nothing you can do will meet our demands and needs. We will forever destroy because we want a world of our own." (You Gentiles, by Jewish Author Maurice Samuels, p. 155).

26. "We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not...You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world." (Chaim Weizmann, Published in "Judische Rundschau," No. 4, 1920)

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Waiting

I sold a gold futures contract last night. I was up a couple hundred and was tempted to wait for a run up. But, with all that's being going on, it should already have moved up. Something is not right, so I'm going to play it safe for now.

We get to see Noah on the twentieth. He and Lauren have been really gracious about trying to give us a day. (mild sarcasm). We're also looking foreward to a trip to the Michigan dunes at the end of the month which will be a great family get together, even if Noan and Lauren are too busy do join us for a day or two. (irony)

Then when we get back the Irish will be kicking off against Georgia Tech.
ND #1, YEAH BABY! My friend Louie hasn't relented in his determination to go to a game this year, so i've been scanning the ticket brokers. Damn, about three hundred dollars each for bad seats (in the corners of the stadium-two hundred fifty for end zone). He's shaming me into it. I tell him its goofy to pay that much and he answers "Don't worry about it, I'll get the tickets." If I'm going I'm paying, and I guess I'm going.

The prices I quoted are for the Stanford game. October 7, after Georgia Tech and the 4 Big 10 opponents and before a by week. If the lads are undefeated at that point it'll be a real scene, and I'm thinking Oct 7th could be a beautiful day for football.. OK, I'm too excited to type any more right now. Love to All.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

I'm sure I got something to say

It's just too hot too think.

Oh, I know. Janett was watching the local bulletin board scroll past on cable TV and thinks she saw that Pink Floyd is scheduled to appear at Hemmens auditorium.

Sounds like something that would happen to a stoned person. Who else would be watching the local bulletin board in the first place. But she doesn't get high, that's just my little angel.